To utilise the most valuable aspects of cloud computing, or to manage and
orchestrate a cloud computing environment at scale, automation tools are
invaluable. Because Catalyst Cloud is based on the world’s most popular open
source cloud computing platform, OpenStack, many automation tools work with the
Catalyst Cloud, or have plugins to work with the Catalyst Cloud.

Behind the scenes, all of the access methods to the Catalyst Cloud are just
accessing the Catalyst Cloud APIs. They just provide convenient abstractions to
do so. Every action you perform on the Catalyst Cloud can be performed via the
APIs.

This means that you can incorporate custom logic into your applications to
modify your infrastructure. This is important for SaaS applications, or
applications that otherwise need to scale to meet demand.

To make this integration easier, the OpenStack community has developed a range
of software development kits (SDKs) for numerious languages. You can find a list
here.

Now that you understand how you can access the Catalyst Cloud, there are a few
small administrative concerns to be aware of before we dive into a hands on
demonstration.